The Assassin Lotus

by David Angsten

  “At what?”

  “I don’t know—interrogation.” I glanced at the sea of faces behind me, then moved in closer and whispered to Anand, “Can’t you make him talk?”

  He answered in a loud voice, “Are you suggesting torture?”

  Was he trying to embarrass me in front of the Buddhists? “Not at all!” I said.

  “Good. I’m quite certain our friends here would not approve of that. Far preferable, I would think, to simply kill the man.”

  I thought he must be joking. But Anand dramatically pulled back his jacket and drew out his kukri knife. I was shocked to glimpse a wet stain of blood above his waist. Anand had been stabbed. Was this some kind of payback?

  He stepped toward the Iranian. The man stared up, defiant. Anand rested the tip of his blade in the hollow of the Assassin’s throat.

  My heart pounded. I thought of the grinning runt in the pit. “Wait—”

  Anand paused.

  “Death is exactly what he wants,” I said. “It’s a part of their code. Woolsey said the Hashishin would rather die than to submit. Threatening to kill him will not make him talk.”

  “I don’t expect him to talk,” Anand said, still holding the blade to his throat.

  “Then what—?”

  “Ask yourself why the Iranians wanted to keep the young woman alive,” he said.

  “Govindi? I don’t know.” It clearly had been a risk to send Jamyang for Dr. Tzu. “Maybe they promised her grandfather they wouldn’t let her die.”

  Anand peered calmly into the cold stare of the Assassin. “I suspect these men have no interest in keeping promises to Buddhist monks.”

  The enfeebled Iranian retracted his lips, presenting a glimpse of his teeth.

  “They must have wanted Govindi as a backup,” I said, “in case Dr. Fiore misled them.”

  “That would imply that she must know as much as her grandfather knows.”

  “Where they grow the lotus, you mean?”

  “If she knows where, would it not seem highly likely that others know as well?”

  “What others?” I asked.

  Anand withdrew his kukri blade and turned his gaze on the monks. “Indeed.” He had their full attention now; all eyes were on him. “Who among you can tell me? Where is Dr. Fiore? Where was he going with the Iranian?”

  A few of the monks glanced at each other, but no one dared to speak.

  Anand asked louder: “Where did the doctor go?”

  The younger monks in the back eyed each other timidly. Up in front the elderly lamas guiltily dropped their gaze.

  Anand sheathed his kukri knife. He raised his right hand, open-palmed—the gesture of good intentions—mirroring the mudra of the golden Buddha behind him. “What you have seen here today is only the beginning,” he explained. “Many more lives are at stake. Many innocent people will die. If you refuse to help us, their blood will be on your hands. We must stop these killers now—before they steal the secret you’ve protected for so long.”

  He waited. Silence. No monk returned his gaze.

  With a flourish Anand unsheathed his knife. He set it once again at the wounded man’s throat. “Speak up now,” he told the monks, “or right here, in front of your Buddha, I swear I will kill this man.”

  The Iranian trembled, staring at the blade. My heart was banging wildly.

  “Aiy!”

  From the back, near the doors, a lone monk hurried forward. The sea of faces turned to him. Anand withdrew his blade.

  It was Jamyang. The young monk came rushing to a halt in front of us. Glancing at the lamas, he turned his anxious face to Anand. “Lama Fiore, he ask… He tell us—no talk. No talk anyone.”

  Anand eyed him silently.

  “But why?” I asked. “He knows what these men want. Surely he knows they’ll kill him for it?”

  “Lama Fiore no afraid of death. He say for no one to follow him.”

  Anand and I exchanged a glance. He looked again at Jamyang. Then he peered into the wintry eyes of the shriveled old monks in front. “Buddha once said, ‘I don’t believe in a fate that falls on men however they act. But I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.’”

  The sitting monks’ fossilized faces remained inscrutable, their eyes betraying nothing.

  “We are not willing to allow Dr. Fiore to die,” Anand said. “Not when there’s a chance we can stop them from killing him.” He turned with his knife to the Assassin and lifted the blade to his throat. “This man, too, claims he is not afraid of death. Are you willing to allow him to die?”

  Anand peered down at him and prepared to plunge the knife. The man stared back into his eyes.

  Jamyang and I looked to the lamas. Tense seconds passed. Finally the oldest lama lifted a frail finger into the air.

  “Stop!” I told Anand.

  The lama struggled to rise. Jamyang hurried to his side and, together with another monk, helped the elderly man to his feet. Together they approached Anand.

  Anand sheathed his dagger. He put his palms together and bowed to the man. The lama’s eyes glittered in a deeply furrowed face. In a high, frail voice, he spoke some words I could not understand but assumed were probably Tibetan.

  Jamyang translated. “He say you same—like the bearded children.” He nodded toward the Iranian, who appeared to have passed out.

  “Believe me,” Anand said, “we are not the same.” From his inside jacket pocket, he drew out three Ziploc bags—the lotus seeds belonging to Dan and Phoebe. “This is the entirety of soma seeds we’ve been able to find so far,” he said. “I want to return them to you.” He held them out to the monks.

  The lama eyed them as Jamyang translated. He gave a subtle nod, and Jamyang received the bags.

  Anand spoke directly to the lama: “Our only intent is to stop these men. And save the doctor’s life.”

  The lama seemed to grasp the words without waiting for Jamyang’s translation. He spoke something in Tibetan, then shuffled off with the other monk while Jamyang remained behind. We looked to him expectantly.

  “He say the Taklimakan thirsty. Your blood, their blood—drink it all the same.”

  Behind us, the sea of monks resumed their deathly chant. The womb-hall throbbed like a beehive. Anand had to shout to be heard. “Fiore went into the Taklimakan?”

  Jamyang nodded. “Before they come, he destroy all the lotus. Bury seeds in desert.”

  “Where?” Anand asked.

  Jamyang’s eyes flitted between us. “Rawak,” he said.

  Anand looked puzzled. “The Rawak Stupa?”

  Jamyang nodded.

  “You know it?” I asked Anand.

  “It’s a Buddhist ruin in the desert,” he said. “Maya told me about it.”

  I’d seen these monumental stupas in India—giant, dome-shaped mounds housing relics of the Buddha. They were places of prayer and pilgrimage, like Christian reliquaries. “You say the seeds are buried there?”

  He nodded. “In Buddha’s jade medicine box.”

  “Black jade?” I asked.

  He nodded enthusiastically. “Yes! See—box no here.” He pointed toward the lap of the golden Buddha. Anand and I moved closer. The Buddha’s giant left hand lay open on his lap, his upturned palm and fingers bent around some missing object—what very well may have been a black jade box.

  “Medicine—the elixir,” I said.

  Anand and I looked at each other. “We need to hurry,” he said. He turned to Jamyang. “Can you—?”

  Jamyang was bent over the slumped Assassin, feeling his wrist for a pulse. He looked to us and shook his head.

  Another one lost to paradise.

  83.

  Fire in the Mind

  FROM WHAT WE COULD UNDERSTAND from Jamyang—and the description Maya had given to Anand—the Rawak Stupa formed the heart of a vast Buddhist temple complex built on the banks of the Black Jade River in the Third or Fourth Century A.D. It was eventually abandoned and fell into ruin as the course of t
he river shifted and the dunes of the Taklimakan Desert rolled in. The Hungarian archaeologist Aurel Stein excavated the remains in 1901, uncovering nearly a hundred clay statues of Buddhas and bodhisattvas, with indications that several hundred more once existed. According to Jamyang, the massive Buddha in the monastery’s pond was a replica of one of those disinterred by Mr. Stein. The original statues, along with the temples, were destroyed by treasure hunters and the brutal desert winds, eventually dissolving into dust. All that remains today, like a punctuation point, is the eroded brick mound of the stupa.

  The last surviving ruin of Shambhala.

  Jamyang, after some coaxing from Anand, agreed to take us there. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Courage engenders charisma, I’d learned. The young monk seemed to share my fascination with Anand. As he drove us over the grasslands at the fringe of the Taklimakan, he asked the Gurkha why he’d been sent to find the soma plant.

  “My government has an historical interest,” Anand replied. “But more importantly, they want to keep it out of the hands of terrorists and assassins.”

  “No,” Jamyang said. “I mean…Why they send you?”

  Anand peered out the grimy windshield of the Volvo. “These Iranians are men of the knife,” he said. “I understand their way of thinking. That’s why the agency sent me.”

  I couldn’t help but wonder if it had more to do with Maya. “Did they ask you, or you ask them?”

  He glanced over his shoulder at me. “I usually don’t go on this kind of mission anymore. Unless I ask for it.”

  I gazed into the haze. The grass was thinning out. Sand filled the empty spaces. “What is their thinking?” I asked. “The Hashishin, with their knives.”

  He didn’t respond straightaway, but after several moments, as we ground our way up the gravel road, he began to reminisce. “My father was an officer in the Gurkhas. He trained at Sandhurst in England. I had a kukri knife in my hands from the day I learned how to walk. He wanted me to become accustomed to it—to ‘make a friend of fear,’ he said. He’d grown up in the mountains, and he fought alongside the British in the Second World War. First Battalion, Second Gurkhas—Cyprus, then North Africa.

  “The Germans had a genuine fear of the Gurkhas, a reputation my father was eager to promote. He’d have his men slip into a German barracks at night and, in silence, slit a dozen throats. Every other soldier had only his boot laces cut. When they woke up in the morning and found the men on either side of them dead, they’d reach for their boots in a panic, see the severed laces, and know that they could easily have lost their lives as well.”

  “Like leaving a dagger on their pillow,” I said.

  “Indeed, the same effect,” Anand said. “The weapon is in truth not the kukri or the dagger. The real weapon is fear. Fear can deter an enemy from taking any action at all.”

  I thought of my paralysis on the steps of the monastery. “Did the trick on me,” I said. I held up my hand. “Look—I’m shaking even now. My dad probably should have kept a steak knife in my cradle.”

  Anand chuckled, then grimaced in pain. He’d wrapped his belly before we’d left, enough to staunch the bleeding. I asked if he was all right.

  “Occasionally I need to be reminded,” he said. “Fear does have its reasons.”

  “I could do with a whole lot less of it,” I said. “I wish I’d taken some of Dan’s soma juice.”

  “Oh no,” Anand said. “A drug like that is far too dangerous. Look at what just happened to your brother. The mastery of fear can be a terrible thing. Think of suicide bombers. Kamikaze pilots.” He glanced at Jamyang. “Even those Buddhist monks who in protest set themselves on fire. The absence of fear is perverse and unnatural.”

  “I thought it’s what people call courage,” I said.

  “Courage is resistance to fear, not the elimination of it. Fear is a kind of pain, an anticipative pain, like the ‘ache’ of desire. It brings energy, intensity, strength. In a way, you might even say it’s the source of courage. If you’re able to accept it, you can work with it, use it.”

  “Like fire,” Jamyang said again.

  “Yes,” Anand said. “Like fire. You can warm yourself with it, you can cook your food with it, or you can burn your house down.” He glanced back at me. “Or you can set your camels ablaze and spur them into battle.”

  Tamerlane, the Earth Shaker. Courage run amok. His egomaniacal ambition and self-serving religious faith had extinguished the normal flickers of fear. All that remained to frighten him, like the looming pit of his grave, was the terror of an unfulfilled desire.

  What a contrast, I thought, from the monkish life of Jamyang. The Buddhist lived his days like a psychological fireman, damping down the flames of passion that routinely flare up in the mind. Greed, resentment, infatuation, fear, instead of being kindled into blazing obsessions, were snuffed out at inception before they leapt out into the world.

  The warrior king and the meditating monk. One had an ego the size of Asia; the other’s would fit on a pinhead. The Scourge of God sought to conquer the world, the Buddhist to conquer himself.

  “What about you?” I asked Anand. “How does a Hindu handle his fear?”

  “With prayer,” he said. “And practice.”

  “With the knife? Or meditation?”

  “A little of both, I should think. One aspires to reside in Brahman—even as one acts in the physical world.”

  “Is Brahman God…or emptiness?” I asked. “—Wait. Don’t tell me.” I imitated his accent. “‘A little of both, I should think.’”

  Anand laughed, then cringed again with pain.

  “You sure you’re all right?” I asked. I knew full well he wasn’t.

  Slowly, he sat upright, gritting his cig-stained teeth. “Sat-chit-ananda: infinite being, infinite consciousness, infinite bliss. Brahman. Hellishly difficult abiding there with this bellyache,” he grumbled.

  I peered out the windshield worriedly. Our talk had eased the tension, but his torment brought it back.

  “End of road,” Jamyang announced.

  Ahead, parked cars materialized in the haze. A flame of terror licked my spine at the sight of a black Mercedes.

  84.

  Dharma Road

  THE THREE CARS were parked near an old stone well surrounded by disintegrating brushwood shelters. Aside from the automobiles—the Mercedes, a Citroën, and a battered SUV—the oasis looked deserted. We climbed out of the Volvo into an utterly lifeless silence. It took a moment before I noticed, standing off in the haze, a mammoth-sized, double-humped Bactrian camel. The camel was tethered to a post, and a seat had been lashed to its back. Uncannily inert, the beast stared off indifferently across the sea of scrubland dunes.

  From this oasis, Jamyang had said, a camel-driver could be hired to make the journey to the stupa, several miles farther into the desert.

  “Better bring extra water,” Anand now told the monk. “Looks like we’ll be walking.”

  He went immediately to inspect the cars, while red-robed Jamyang shuffled to the well. I trudged past the empty shelters and headed out toward the camel. The odor of dung grew pungent. Straw lay scattered at the animal’s feet and clung to its coffee-colored fur. Its miniature cousin still resided in my pocket, and as I reached my hand in to clutch the silky jade, the living beast turned its languid eyes on me, as if it had expected I’d be showing up by now.

  “At long last we meet,” I said. “Salaam alaikum, Camel.”

  Camel kept his frown.

  “I’m Lawrence. Of Chicago.”

  It leisurely shifted its gaze toward the well. Blankets padded its wood-frame seat and saddlebags hung from the frame. The camel’s ear looked chewed. I noticed tethers dangling from the other hitching posts, and several piles of fresh dung gleaming on the sand. A chaotic collage of footprints and hoof prints trailed off into the dunes.

  Why had this camel been saddled up and left behind? I wondered.

  Anand had joined Jamyang at the well. As I appr
oached, they turned to me grimly.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  They waited for me to look. At the bottom of the well, some forty feet down, a man in a white dishdasha lay dead. Even in the dimness I could see his bloody throat.

  “The camel driver,” Anand said.

  “Why?”

  “Jamyang says Fiore knows the way to the stupa. Apparently Mr. Mahbood felt he didn’t need a guide.”

  I looked toward the cars.

  “The SUV belongs to the camel driver,” Anand said. “According to the rental papers, the Citroën belongs to your friend.”

  “Faraj?!”

  “He must have arrived sometime after them. The engine is still warm.”

  “He’s following them,” I said. I peered off in the direction of the tracks. “Why wouldn’t he take the guide’s camel?”

  “Crossing on foot would be stealthier,” Anand said. “The same should hold true for us.” He looked me and Jamyang in the eye, as if ferreting out any doubts. “Are we ready?”

  Jamyang hesitated, then nodded.

  I looked back at the cars. Something still troubled me. “What do you think happened to Vanitar?”

  “I don’t know,” Anand said. He tramped off briskly, calling back, “When we find Mr. Mahbood, you can ask him!”

  Jamyang and I exchanged a look. Then reluctantly followed the Gurkha.

  BEYOND THE OASIS, the dunes grew deep and bare of brush. We trudged up and down the trail of tracks, with Jamyang now doggedly leading us, his robe a red flame against the dust-laden sky. The silence was all-consuming. It seemed to swallow the swish of our steps and stifle Anand’s labored breathing. I worried about his wound and glanced back frequently to check on him. He held his belly as he walked and kept his eyes fixed on the ground, attentive to every step.

  Finally I slowed and walked beside him. Hoping, I suppose, to reassure myself, I asked again if he was all right.

  He glanced at me with a painful grin. “I trust I’m not merely raising dust.”

  The phrase triggered a memory. “Maya said that to me in Rome. Something about the traveler…hesitating. Raising dust on the road.”